Shame live at SXSW (photo: Evan Pring/ Live4ever Media)
In 2014, with some justification, the Manic Street Preachers looked upon a musical landscape which they believed was strangely silent on the issues the world was facing up to at that time.
“I go to gigs and I barely hear a political or radical statement from any musician these days,” frontman James Dean Bradfield told NME. “It’s really weird that we’ve been through so many wars and economic crashes and we had the English riots a couple of years back and it barely seems to touch the surface of the musical canon. People seem almost baffled by how to channel that indelible tension into music.”
Fast forward four years, and 2018 has much more to say for itself. Out of the same North London pub, the Fat White Family and Shame – together with the likes of Idles, LIFE, Slaves and Cabbage – have brought wit, social commentary and simmering anger charging back to the front of British independent music.
And since South By Southwest has for a long time now been the main hub at which the best emerging UK talent convenes, then this year’s festival was thus treated to some of the most memorable, wild and crazy moments of interaction between Austin locals and those of the aforementioned bands in attendance that it has ever seen.
Shame may well prove to be this bright new era’s zenith, their debut album Songs Of Praise its magnum opus. Live4ever was there at the British Music Embassy for one of their ‘warm up’ shows right at the start of SXSW as they prepared to embark on a stay which would take in another seven gigs during that grueling week.
Check out our pro shoot of two highly charged performances of the album’s standouts, Lampoon and Gold Hole, right here:
